Beyond Java - Bruce Tate [16]
The fathers of Java saw the importance of security, and baked it into the language. Java introduced a generation of programmers to the term sandbox , which limited the scope and destructive power of applications.
Java had improved packaging and extensibility. You could effectively drop in extensions to Java that transparently added to capabilities of a language. You could use different types of archives to package and distribute code.
Both the low-level grunts and high-level architects had something to love. Businesspeople had a motivation to move. At this point, if all else had failed, Java would have been a successful language. But it didn't fail. The winds just kept picking up speed, and the storm started feeding on itself.
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[*] TheServerSide.com, "Doug Cutting—Founder of Lucene and Nutch," Tech Talk (March 10, 2005); http://www.theserverside.com/talks/videos/DougCutting/interview.tss.
Fury Unleashed
Applets captured the imagination of programmers everywhere. They solved the deployment problem, they were cool, and they were easy to build. We're only now finding a set of technologies, based on the ugly and often objectionable JavaScript language, that can build rich content for the Web as well as Java did. Still, applets started to wane.
Even today, I think that applets represent a powerful idea, but they fizzled out for many reasons. The Netscape browser's JVM was buggy and unpredictable. Further, with such a rapidly evolving language, applets presented many of the same problems that client-server computing did. You may not have to maintain applications, but you still had to maintain the browser. After you'd deployed a few Java applets, you had to worry about keeping the right version of the browser on the desktop. As the size of the JVM grew, it became less and less likely that you could install a JVM remotely. Even if you could, Java versions came out often enough, and were different enough, that new applications frequently needed to materialize. But a few mad scientists at Sun were up to the challenge again.
James Duncan Davidson: Why Java Won
Author of The Rise of Java
James Duncan Davidson is a freelance computer programmer, photographer, author, and speaker. He invented both Ant and Tomcat, two of the most successful Java open source projects ever. His persistent efforts at Sun led to open sourcing both projects. He is now one of the best-selling authors of Apple operating system books.
What do you like best about Java?
JDD: At the time, it seemed like a really good idea. Mostly, for what Java was designed for, they got it right. Of course, it's a strongly typed language, which for some purposes is great, and other purposes not.
Why do you think it's so successful?
JDD: I think it comes down to the fact that server-side programming in Perl and the like was inefficient, and server-side programming in C and C++ was hard. Java, and servlets in particular, busted open a door for Java where it could really take root.
I may be biased because of my involvement with servlets, but Java without the server side wasn't that interesting. It still isn't. Sure, J2ME is on bazillions of mobile devices, but there aren't that many apps there—and the APIs there are limited unless you actually make the cell phone.
What don't you like?
JDD: Strong typing. Reliance on APIs rather than frameworks. That's a subtle but important distinction. The increasing complexity of even basic APIs. For example, you can't just write a servlet anymore, you have to write a servlet, then edit an XML file. They're killing off the approachability that helped servlets get off the ground. With it, the rest of the server stack gets more and more difficult to work with.
And reliance on tools to make it easy is a cop-out.
As well, I don't like the massive monolithic approach to "Editions." Most people don't need J2EE. They need a web container. End of story.
I also don't